You're sure you know your third-grade teacher's name.
It's like you're hovering over it in your mind, but it just won't materialize.
Researchers call this tantalizing torment a tip-of-the-tongue state, and it's something everyone experiences.
But what's actually happening when a word gets caught here, and how can you best get it unstuck?
Most of the time, our brains seamlessly summon words from vast stores of knowledge, pairing their meaning and sounds, and stringing them into sentences.
But in a tip-of-the-tongue moment, this retrieval process derails, and there's the sensation of remembering the word, but the struggle to recall it.
In these moments, on top of the usual brain activity associated with word retrieval, we also see other brain regions light up, like the conflict-detecting anterior cingulate, which generates that urgently frustrating feeling.
It's unclear whether the target word is directly detected and just not successfully recalled, or associations are simply helping the brain infer that it has the word.
The reality could also be some combination of these hypotheses.
But the experience is pretty consistent with how psycholinguistic theorists think we mentally organize language-related information, going from the word's meaning and associations to how it sounds.
